Jeremy Clarkson row is an overreaction

Never mind suspending its presenters – perhaps it’s time for the BBC to suspend humour. After the uproar over Brand and Ross’s adolescent sniggerings have come a hullabaloo over a supposedly homophobic joke on Have I Got News for You, a brouhaha over a Frankie Boyle gag on Mock the Week, and now a rumpus about an aside by Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear.

On Sunday night’s episode he murmured that being a lorry driver must be a hard job: “Change gear, change gear, change gear, check your mirrors, murder a prostitute…” So far, around 200 viewers have complained.

Well, here’s a complaint of my own: we’re complaining far too much now. I won’t defend Clarkson’s line as a joke: it’s not very funny. But I don’t agree that it’s offensive in the way that Brand and Ross were. Brand and Ross humiliated a blameless man on national radio. They picked on somebody.

Clarkson did not. He made a flippant remark about a kind of person – nobody specific, just a stereotype, a caricature. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t clever, it wasn’t tasteful. But it wasn’t intended to hurt.

The suggestion that Clarkson was alluding to Steve Wright, who killed five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006, seems tenuous to me – as well as a lorry driver, Wright also worked as a waiter, a chef, a steward on the QE2 and a barman, and at the time of his arrest was a driver of forklift trucks, not lorries.

We appear to have reached a stage where any joke more risqué than those involving chicken crossing roads is unloosing a cyclone of indignation. Two hundred may not be a lot, in viewer complaint terms – but then remember how few complaints Brand and Ross received initially.

Let’s save our ire for comics who bully, and either forgive or overlook the merely flippant – especially when it’s Clarkson, who has been rolling out politically incorrect gags of this sort for 20 years now.

If you are a lorry driver, and you feel grievously wounded by Clarkson’s facetious generalisation, feel free to post a facetious generalisation below about all motoring programme presenters – or indeed all television journalists. Then can we call it quits?